The Killing Season 4: What a falling otf

I am dutifully watching the final season, six episodes, of The Killing, but lamentably have to note what a falling off is there: the first two seasons were terrific, as Linden and Holder unravelled the complex case, Who killed Rosie Larsen? The 3rd season was not nearly as good as it went for a grotesque, sensational, and highly improbable case, as opposed to the original case which was, on the surface, more or a routine homicide that proved intriguingly complex and ambiguous as more facts emerged in each episode. The great thing about the first season was combined minimal and maximal approach: a lot of the focus was on the family of the victim, who at times were suspects themselves, and also on the politics of the city, as a mayoral candidate got caught up in the sweep of the investigation. And of course the developing relationship between Linden and Holder, made especially interesting in these two seasons as we never quite knew whether we could trust Holder. By the 3rd season, he was more rock solid and the two of them were like a thousand other buddy cops trying to solve a case. Few were satisfied with the wrapup of season 3, and that's where season 4 picks up, but the season never gets off the ground. L & H begin investigating another pretty gruesome case - the killing of an entire family save for the son who's at a military academy and immediately becomes a suspect. We know by now that the formula is to shuffle through a sequence of likely suspects, each one cleared in turn, until finally settling on someone we'd least suspect (or so they think - I figured out season 3 pretty quickly). The main element of the story (spoiler for those who haven't seen season 3) is L & H trying to conceal the fact that she executed Lt. Skinner at the end of season 4. There are so many loose ends to this plot element that it's not even worth analyzing or thinking about; I would say however, that episode 3 has a few fine moments centered on Holder, who, surprisingly, is beginning to crack under the pressure of concealing their crime - returning to drink and drugs, pretty much breaking up his relationship with a nice young woman (they seem a terrible mismatch, however), heading for the deep end. It's the personal stuff, not the baroque plotting, that can maybe save this final season of the series.

Fascinating story from start to finish: Finding Vivian Maier

As a work of cinema it breaks no new ground - and I really wish contemporary documentaries would give up on the idea of a pulsating, beat-driven musical score - but John Maloof's Finding Vivian Maier tells an incredibly fascinating story and is riveting from start to finish - constantly amazing us and provoking us with complex and unanswerable questions about a strange genius with a dark and mysterious personality. As all probably know, Maloof bought a cache of undeveloped negatives at a Chicago auction house - he was looking for some pictures of old-time Chicago for a history project he was working on - and found the photos he bought to be of extraordinary quality. He engaged in the research of a historical detective - he must have training in the field, as well as incredible drive, tenacity, and curiosity - and found that the photographer, Vivian Maier, was a complete amateur with no training - she worked for many years as a nanny in suburban Chicago. The film consists of interviews with the for whom she worked, the now-adult children in her charge, as well as some photographers and film historians. Maier shot thousands of frames - as well as some super 8 film - over the course of her life and never made any serious effort to show her work to anyone. Anyone looking at these knows right away that these are simply great photographs - and now they've been exhibited quite widely and she's gained or is gaining posthumous recognition as one of the great street photographers of the 20th century. It's incredible and shameful that nobody recognized this in her lifetime, but she just didn't have the connections - right school, right agent, right gallery, right friends - to get her work seen. She also was hindered by her very odd personality (actually, her oddity is probably what allowed her to approach people, often people in pain and suffering, and take beautiful photos) - she was clearly a victim of abuse, was distrustful and even hateful of men, was often cruel to the children in her care, later in life because a very serious hoarder - apparently a few people she worked for and with helped her out in the last years of her life (she died in 2009) but Maloof leaves this a little vague. She died in poverty, though, and her photos are now worth a lot of $ - Maloof quite frankly says he wishes he could share his bounty with her in some way. I think he has! One of the astonishing moments - maybe not surprising, when you think about it - is when he shows that he offered her collection to MOMA only to receive a form letter saying sorry not interested. Connections matter, I guess - be they wish now that they'd actually looked at what Maloof was offering. BTW I would not consider Maier an "outsider" artist; she was an outsider person, but her work is not outside of any tradition of unusual in itself - it is direct (as Maloof notes) in line with the great street photographers who were her contemporaries or predecessors - Arbus, Cartier-Bresson, et al.

Palestinian-Israeli conflict - a powerful film about this crisis

Not sure of the provenance of the recent film Omar - certainly suspect it's from a Palestinian cast and crew, though very often the low-budget, intelligent "foreign" films such as this one are co-produced - but in any case it's a very thoughtful and well-constructed dramatic look at the Israel-Palestinian conflict through the POV of a single young Palestinian man committed to his revolutionary ideals but torn as he begins to suspect some of his co-activists of complicity and double-dealing. The eponymous Omar takes part in an ambush attach on some Israeli soldiers; the youngest of the trio in the ambush, as a kind of initiation, takes the first sniper shot and kills an Israeli soldier. Subsequently, Omar gets arrested and tortured in prison but he refuses to give information, bravely. A fellow prisoner briefly befriends him and gives him warnings about confessing to a crime; Omar says he will never confess to anything, which proves to be his undoing - the seeming friend is an Israeli intelligence agent, who works to win over Omar to becoming a spy for the Israelis; Omar seems to agree, but then becomes a double-agent - leading to many further complications. Despite the many nuances - a great deal of tension, as we stay strictly w/ Omar's POV and have no idea who among his co-conspirators may have turned, if anyone - the movies is a very clear narrative line and easy to follow - and even has an emotional subtext, as Omar is in love and hope to marry, but the revolution - including suspicions among his people that he may be an Israeli spy - all inform against him. Like most political movies, I guess, this one is very one-sided: the Israelis are universally horrible and the Palestinians are the noble and oppressed minority: to its credit, the film shows them assassinating an Israeli soldier in a random attack, but there is no emotional component to that death - we know nothing about the man who was shot to death or how his death may have affected family, friends, others. Still, it's a strong movie on its own terms and gives yet another window into the tragic dynamics of this increasingly insoluble crisis.

Looking back at The Last Picture Show

Incredibly enough I had never see Peter Bogdanovich's 1971 film The Last Picture Show until now - and maybe that's to my advantage; it was enlightening to look at the film some 45 years after its making and to see it as a triple-retro piece: it was made in 1971 but set in 1951 and using film techniques (b/w cinema, somewhat stagey dialog, ambitious plotting) perhaps more typical of the 40s or even the 30s. Amazingly, the film holds up very well and we can still see its influence today on many other films that have examined the frustrations, challenges, and social codes of small-town life and the rage of young people who feel both loyal to and stultified by their surroundings: think about the recent, excellent Nebraska, which also used b/w cinematography, though in wide-screen format and with high-def photographic precision, rather than the rather grainy cinematography that Bogdanovich sought. As noted, the film is rich in plot and has several strong lead characters - and supporting characters, notably Chloris Leachman as a sorrowful middle-aged woman ignored by her husband (there are strong hints that he, the high-school coach, is a homosexual) who turns to a young man in town for fulfillment and affection, with the obvious unhappy consequences. There's a lot of sorrow, and humor as well - all the men in town razzing the football players about their horrible performance on the field (this is a an anti-Friday Night Lights, in a sense - the town is much more isolated and lonely and the mood far, far darker). The femme fatale, played well by Cybil Sheppard in the debut, is a force who destroys everything she touches in town; the lead character, Timothy Bottoms, is sweet, weak, and trapped: what will he become? Well, we know the answer, sort of, because Larry McMurtry, who wrote the source novel, did at least one sequel - in fact, it was awful and I would ignore it. He was great on this film, and I think the film helped make his career as a writer - which culminated w/ his masterpiece, Lonesome Dove. It's a shame that the film didn't lead to better things for Bogdanovich - who was really smart and brave to pick this topic and to make such a powerful and heartfelt film from this bleak though emotionally rich material. My impression, from the documentary on the DVD, is that PB was extremely difficult to work w/, which may in part explain the relative dullness of the rest of his movie career (though he's done a lot of TV work and played a great in peripheral role in The Sopranos).

Hyper-realism in Like Someone in Love

Abbas Kiarostami's 2012 film Like Someone in Love is a further step in his unusual, international career - compare with his early Taste of Cherry set in native Iran and more recent Certified Copy set in France - and in all three cases serious, literary plot, focus on two central characters, long scenes played out in real time - like Rohmer but a step further - little character background, unexplained mysteries about the central relationships, and abrupt endings that don't quite resolve all of the conflicts. I have to say I admired Like Someone more than I actually liked it; K. becomes I think one of the few Western directors to set a movie in Japan, in Japanese, with an all-Japanese cast. This story focuses on a young woman, college student, moonlight as a high-priced call girl (why a woman with her youth, beauty, and charm would do so is completely unexplained and unexamined - she doesn't appear to have a drug problem or any other issue that would drive her to such behavior). In first scene her pimp gives her an assignment with a man whom he says he really respects; she tries to get out of the deal, but relents - blowing off a visit from her grandmother who came to Tokyo unannounced to see her - we hear many poignant voice messages from this elderly woman, and the girl, Akiko, takes a cab to the train station where she sees her grandmother waiting and she keeps going - obviously shamed. The man who's hired her turns out to be an elderly professor; their relationship, at least that night, is chaste - he takes her to her college where she is to finish an exam and there he's confronted by her "finance" who believes him to be her grandfather, and he asks for advice and for his blessing, and of course complications ensue. On the one hand, I do admire K's films and others that develop their story lines slowly, lovingly, and carefully - and he's among the best at use of real time: when we talk with someone for say 10 minutes it seems like nothing but when characters in a movie engage in one scene of dialog for 10 minutes it seems eternal - and K uses this dichotomy very well for effect, the scenes seem realistic but also, within the faster paced grammar of cinema, they feel strange and artificial, hyper-realistic. Sometimes, as a result, my patience waned and I just wanted the story to move along - and as it builds toward its conclusion it ends with a burst of energy and violence, which K keeps at the periphery of his film - though others would have used this as their central conflict, or even their opening scene. He has a style all his own, or mostly his own - one that's not for all viewers but a accomplishment in and of itself.

Unusual and highly personal documentary about the Killing Fields of Cambodia

The French-produced documentary The Missing Picture about the killing fields of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia in the 70s and 80s is a very powerful, imaginative, yet also flawed movie: the greatest strength is the highly unusual way in which the filmmaker, R. Pranh, uses painted ceramic figures to reenact and recreate the many scenes of the horror of those days, which he apparently lived through as a boy and young man, because the scenes are lost to history - few were recorded or documented in any manner as the country itself shunned all "imperialist" art and forms of individual expression and moved ever closer to a peasant society from the middle ages - except that it was really a horrendous autocracy under the rule of the evil Pol Pot. Pranh strikingly juxtaposes the scenes he creates with the ceramic figures against some of the surviving footage from the era: Pnomh Penh being emptied by the Khmer Rouge, children working in the rice paddies and building stone sluiceways, Pol Pot cheerful and smiling in front of massive "adoring" crowds - just awful, frightening, and the juxtapositions Pranh develops - sometimes through montage and sometimes through superimposition - are very powerful moments: the sorrow and pathos of a grown man re-creating his youth through ceramic figures will remind some of the great documentary about an outsider artist, Marwencol; the weird acceptance of horror will also recall the recent Danish-made documentary about the killings in Indonesia. Unfortunately, the film - narrated in first person by (a stand-in in English) for Pranh, his own long narrative jumps around quite a bit from theme to theme and could definitely use more of a developmental arc, either a timeline some other form of organization. I also would have like to know more about him in later life and more about the creation and use of the ceramics: was it just of this film? or some other form or expression or obsession? We see a little bit of the use of these in the closing credits, but not enough. There have been other films about the Killing Fields and the Khmer Rouge, but probably none so personal as this one.

True Southern Gothic

There's a lot of plot material to work through in the last two episodes of season one of True Detective, and to be honest the plot itself is pretty ridiculous and so far beyond the probable as to be almost ludicrous at times; reminded me in a way of Girl w/ Dragon Tattoo - all these disappearances and dismemberments and nobody makes the connection until Rust becomes obsessed a decade later - and then things fall into place with amazing ease (just happen to find a woman in a nursing home who just happens to remember who painted her house 20 years ago and what he looked like ... and so forth). That said, particularly in the last episode, we get plenty of the material that draws us to this odd series: the long bizarre introspective philosophical rants from Rust, set off by the blunt incredulity of Marty; their tense but deep bond of affection and grudging respect; the excellent cinematography; and the extreme Southern gothic, with grotesque characters, weed-choked ruined buildings, remote and insular communities. That's been enough to keep me watching, even though I don't believe it for a minute, and I'll probably return for season 2.